St. Peter's Reilly Walsh soaring through the summer

Reilly Walsh didn’t waste any time making an impression at the beginning of the travel basketball season.

Playing for the Staten Island Stingrays 11th-grade team, Walsh had a pair of 38-point games in April. Once came against a powerful Kendall Madison squad from Long Island and the other came in the Pitt Jam against the Pittsburgh Legends, a team that went on to the quarterfinals of that loaded tournament.

That was during the early live recruiting period, and now the Stingrays are wrapping up their season with two big tournaments that will give coaches another look at the 6-foot-3 guard who will be a senior at St. Peter’s in the fall.

Walsh already has one Division I scholarship offer from NJIT, according to his father and Stingrays coach John Walsh, with several other schools still evaluating him.

“We visited Columbia and Penn,” said John Walsh. “Those are the two Ivy League schools that have shown interest. Northeastern has called. They’ll definitely be there this weekend. Fordham and Iona have shown interest.”

This weekend the Stingrays are headed to the Hall of Fame National Invitational, where they’ll play in a showcase game on Friday night before the two-day tournament proper begins on Saturday.

Next week they’ll conclude in Richmond, Virginia on the campus of VCU.

The team may be short several players over the next two weekends due to injury or family obligations.

Most recently they went 3-0 in the Pre Nationals Tune-Up at the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. Reilly Walsh had a total of 64 points in the three games.

Driscoll, Farley and Frasca have been the Stingrays’ top scorers after Walsh.

“We’ve competed, I thought well, in Pittsburgh, which was a live period event,” said John Walsh. “We won that tournament in Madison. I think we’ll compete pretty well. We’re a little undersized.”

The sizable group from St. Peter’s has also been playing for John Walsh in the Elizabeth, N.J. summer league, where they’ve compiled an 8-0 record with one regular season game left.

Reilly Walsh gave himself a nice bump on the recruiting trail at the very end of his junior season. With St. Peter’s deep run in the CHSAA playoffs the Eagles played quarterfinal and semifinal games at Fordham University, the types of dates that lure in college coaches.

Walsh sprung for 24 points in a quarterfinal rout of Archbishop Molloy, then had 25 in the semifinal loss to Bishop Loughlin.

“It definitely put him on people’s radar screens,” said John Walsh. “A lot of people go back to those games they saw him play and wanted to track him from there.”

Then came the explosion in Pittsburgh, which generated the kind of word of mouth that had John Walsh taking calls from college coaches who hadn’t actually seen his son play yet.

“It’s an understanding of the game,” said John Walsh. “You hit a couple of jump shots, now it’s a ball fake. Learn to get yourself open. He plays the whole game.

“The guys that I’ve talked to kind of appreciate the whole effort. They like the fact that he can put it on the floor. He can help against pressure and distribute for others. The reason he gets on the radar is he can knock down shots, but I’m happy that he plays the rest of the game.”